Inspired Philosophers

Might Socrates and Plato have been inspired by God? Why not? asks Edwards ( The Miscellanies, 1153-1360 , #1162). After all, “Inspiration is not so high an honor and privilege as some are ready to think. It is no peculiar privilege of God’s special favorites. Many very bad men have been the subjects of it, yea, some that were idolaters.”

God might have good reason to inspire some outside Israel: “(1) they might dispose the heathen nations, as they had occasion to converse with the Jews and to be informed of the revelations and prophecies that they had among them, to attend the more to them and to inquire into them and their evidences; (2) they might prepare the Gentile nations, that had among them the records of these sayings of their most noted and famous wise men, to receive the gospel when God’s time came for its promulgation among these nations, by disposing them the more diligently and impartially to attend to it; (3) they may be of great benefit to the Christian church ages after they were delivered, as they serve as a confirmation of the great truths of Christianity; (4) we know not what evidence God might give to the men themselves that were the subjects of these inspirations that they were divine and were true (as we know not what evidence was given to the wise men of the East of the divinity of their revelations). And so we know not of how great benefit the truths suggested might be to their own souls.”